George Wolfe in Progress

How will the director handle Joe Papp’s legacy? The launch of Wolfe’s first fall season at the Public Theatre and the opening of Broadway’s “Perestroika” offer clues.

Papp felt strongly that Wolfe could head his own theatre with his own vision.Credit Illustration by Richard Merkin.

A good director screens out the static, so that the signal comes over clear and strong. George C. Wolfe has been very well directed. His edges are fuzz-free. His hair is cropped close, his body is thin, his eyes are wide open behind wire-framed round spectacles. He wears exquisite shirts and tennis shoes. His voice is a modulated honk. He is always moving. Even sitting down, he seems to vibrate. I have a postcard of Jiminy Cricket in top hat and white gloves at the window of a candy store, arms outstretched and eyes popping. When I see Wolfe, I think of that postcard. He is an animated character.

One day this summer, he taped two notes, scrawled in red ink on orange cards, to the door of his office, at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre. “It’s exhausting being fabulous,” the first read. And, below, “Especially when it’s a full time job.” It’s a joke, but he’s not kidding. (A couple of weeks later, his secretary replaced the cards with a printed sign bearing the same message.) “Being fabulous” is a good job description for Wolfe’s new position as the producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival. Or, to put it more sociologically, his task is to restore charismatic leadership to an organization that ever since Joseph Papp’s death, in October, 1991, has floundered without it.

You reach Wolfe’s office through a door on Lafayette Street next to the main entrance to the Public Theatre. Once the receptionist buzzes, you are in a maze of rooms, staircases, and hallways which confounds architectural logic. To get to a toilet, for example, Wolfe must leave his private office, walk through an outer office to the foyer, and then, following a path of ratty white carpet remnants mounted on old black linoleum, circumnavigate the Anspacher, one of the Public’s five theatres, to reach an open space painted hospital green and offering, among other amenities, two rest rooms. The building is the former Astor Library, which was rescued from demolition by Papp with great fanfare in the mid-sixties and retrofitted into the most famous nonprofit theatre in America. It’s a testament to Papp’s gumption, his urban spirit, his flair (as he showed with Shakespeare) for turning something beautiful and old into something marvellously new. Without him, however, the inefficient layout, the undersized theatres, the rumbling subway, the erratic office air-conditioning, and innumerable other impracticalities glare in high relief. The building seems all bumps and barnacles, a shell that formed around Papp and makes no sense without him. The top staff, too, is tied to Papp. The managing director, Jason Steven Cohen, was hired by Papp in 1972; one of the two associate producers, Rosemarie Tichler, was hired by Papp in 1974; the director of ticket services, Alison Harper, was hired by Papp in 1967. In early June, Wolfe told a colleague, “I wish I had a stick of dynamite, so I could blow this place up and start all over again.”

But a theatre administrator, like a director, replaces each piece gingerly, aware that the structure may unexpectedly topple. When I first met Wolfe, at the Walter Kerr Theatre last April, he was in rehearsals for “Millennium Approaches,” the first part of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” (The second part, “Perestroika,” starts previews next month.) Wolfe was relighting one scene and then tinkering with the set. During a break, I remarked on how each change dictated a subsequent change. “Exactly,” he said. “It’s like one of my favorite stories. In the Hawaiian Islands, one of the Polynesian kings had died. His wife was next in line to replace him, and she said, ‘You know that rule where all the women eat after the men? I don’t think that’s very interesting. Let’s get rid of that. Everyone will eat at the same time.’ Because of that one change, society had a nervous breakdown. That’s one of the theories of why Cook was so successful in taking over the islands, because they were in chaos when he got there.” He laughed—a big laugh that started in his narrow chest and pealed like a bell. “That’s what’s happening here now.”

Wolfe is a doggedly sequential director. Rather than tackle the biggest problems first, he begins at the beginning, and only when he is satisfied with that will he go on to the next scene. As time runs out, his collaborators squirm. “You’re gripping your seat, wondering if you’re going to get the angel fixed—which is the last thing in the play—before the critics come,” Kushner said just before “Millennium” opened, last May. “He literally got to it the afternoon the critics came.” Wolfe approaches the revitalization of the Public Theatre in the same spirit. After the board of the New York Shakespeare Festival abruptly fired JoAnne Akalaitis last March and hired Wolfe to take Papp’s title of producer, the organization idled like a car awaiting a new driver. All the departments—literary, development, marketing, press—needed direction, but Wolfe, who was then preoccupied with the “Millennium” rehearsals, couldn’t provide it. Once he settled in, early in May, he ignored his business and development staff, so that with his artistic associates he could plan next season’s schedule. “It’s like building a body,” he said. “Right now, I’ve been assessing the head. Later, I’ll do the torso. Then it’ll be the limbs.” At times while he perfected the nose, though, the lower body appeared to be hemorrhaging. Not until mid-August, with the imminent fall season tingling in the air, did he turn his attention to reaching subscribers and other ticket buyers.

What he hoped to achieve at the Public Theatre I could see occurring, on a small scale, in the gradual transformation of his private office. “This office is like a dungeon,” he said not long after he moved into it. It’s a small room that is indeed proportioned like an oubliette, with a double-height ceiling and two arched windows way overhead. The major piece of furniture is a huge wooden desk, almost as wide as the room. Wolfe sits behind it. “When JoAnne was here, she had the desk facing the wall,” he remarked. “A coup could be coming and she didn’t want to know about it. I want to see the troops coming.” Along with the desk, he inherited a couple of director’s chairs, a scuffed black wooden coffee table, and a black sofa that would be at home in a college-dorm room. In May, the office was cluttered with Wolfe’s decorations, including African figurines and a poster from his first Broadway show, “Jelly’s Last Jam,” and with detritus, like two vases of dying flowers and an unplugged floor fan. Over the summer, things changed. Junk like the fan disappeared quickly. The chairs and table made way in August for a pair of oak-and-brass-nailed leather chairs and a matching oak table. The flowers were now reliably fresh. Above the couch was a makeready grid of the coalescing season schedule for the different theatres—file cards marked with plays and their directors, taped to the wall. As the room became more orderly and pared down, I noticed things that had always been there but had escaped my attention, such as a framed photograph of Wolfe and Papp on a trip to Warsaw in 1989.

I was reminded of something that Robin Wagner, the set designer who worked with Wolfe on “Jelly” and “Angels,” had told me: “With George, anything on the stage has to make its place felt. Everything gets distilled down to whatever comment he’s making visually. You can litter the stage with props, but it’s like littering the text with words: unless they’re in a certain order and making sense, there’s no point.” Wolfe likes to have his designers provide him with an excess of material, which he can then whittle away. “Michael Bennett used to say, ‘You make the instruments, I’ll play them,’ ” Wagner said. “That’s what George wants—all the possibilities.” Wagner worked on seven shows with Bennett, and he sees a number of similarities between the two directors. “George doesn’t think of the stage as trying to create a site, or geographical place,” he said. “It’s about an event. That’s something he shares with Michael. The more you make the audience work, the more involved they become. If you give them enough of a line, they’ll fill it with color.”

I became used to Wolfe’s collaborators’ likening him to the greatest artists they had worked with. “He’s a lot like Bob Fosse in his ability to have darkness be as tangible as the areas of light,” the lighting designer Jules Fisher said. “In ‘Jelly,’ the blackness for George was a character. He wanted every scene we put onstage to be encapsulated by this void, a blackness that you could imagine went on forever. Another way he’s like Bob Fosse is that he has a real sense of how motion-picture techniques can be used in the theatre—for example, how a face can appear out of nowhere with pinpoint lighting, or the fluidity with which he goes from one scene to another.” But when Luther Henderson, a composer and musical adapter, brought up the creative giant in his own work history, I thought he was making a larger equation, one that subsumed the others. “I liken him to a leader like Duke Ellington, who was supposed to be a ‘jazz composer’ but had in his orchestra Cootie Williams and Johnny Hodges and so forth—these people who were part and parcel of his composition,” Henderson said. “Like Ellington, he pulls people through his thoughts. In turn, we push him through. You get the feeling that nobody but you could have done this for George.”

This push and pull is what Wolfe calls “a tribal dynamic, where I’m running it but we’re all a part of it.” Like a great editor or politician, he has the knack of assessing someone’s talents and calling forth his best work. One afternoon in July, the director of play development, Morgan Jenness, a blond woman in her mid-thirties, wearing bluejeans and very old sneakers, brought into Wolfe’s office Philip Kan Gotanda, a plump Asian-American playwright dressed in a splashy black-and-white shirt and black shorts. Joking and laughing, Wolfe asked what Gotanda, who lives in California, had been doing in New York. He inquired after mutual acquaintances. He said teasingly that Jenness had described a short film of Gotanda’s to him in excruciating detail. Then he turned the conversation to Gotanda’s play “In the Dominion of Night: Featuring Joe Ozu and the New Orientals,” which he and Jenness had been analyzing that morning.

“I thought the play was very interesting, very interesting,” he began.

Gotanda smiled with gratification.

Then Wolfe remarked that the Orientals who enter the play disappear well before the end, and somehow that makes the play “less dangerous.” He told Gotanda, “It takes away some of the edge. Do you know what I’m saying?”

Gotanda said he thought he did.

“When I began it, I went, ‘Oh really, oh really, oh really,’ ” Wolfe continued, talking fast now and demonstrating with his rising volume level his ascending interest. “And then it became ‘Oh really, oh . . . really.’ ” His diminuendo sank to the inaudible. “It went from being intimate to being even smaller. And I thought it was going to either open up or become even more painfully intimate.”

Gotanda nodded. “I think I understand,” he said. “I think the rewrites I’m working on will take care of some of that.”

“Great,” Wolfe said, beaming. “Great.”

People will tell you how exceptionally articulate a director Wolfe is, but what they are describing is not (in theatrical terms) his text but his performance. He speaks an idiosyncratic lingo reminiscent of a beginning-reader book in which the author limits himself to two hundred vocabulary words. Wolfe’s favorite words—“party,” “dynamic,” “journey,” “fascinating,” “elegant,” “vision,” “rhythm,” “energy”—recur frequently. They are pointers, not markers, and they depend upon Wolfe’s delivery for their meaning and their impact. The distinction hit me the second time I saw “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the musical that established Wolfe’s commercial reputation. He both directed it and wrote the book. Telling the story of Jelly Roll Morton, a jazz composer who advanced an African-American art form but reviled his African-American roots, Wolfe conceived the musical as a Judgment Day on which Morton, guided by an underworld m.c. known as Chimney Man, relives his past and recognizes his errors. It is what Wolfe refers to as Jelly’s “journey,” but the dust is blown off that stale word by a brilliant production design featuring a progress through a series of doors: the Dogon door through which Chimney Man appears, the fanlight door of Jelly’s respectable Creole grandmother, bare pine barroom doorframes, cattle-car doors, a beaded-string roadhouse door, cool pink neon rectangles in Harlem, closed office doors marked “Private.” By inhabiting an abstract, clichéd word, Wolfe reinvented it. The staging and the performances were so vivid that not until a second visit did I concentrate on the words. From Chimney Man’s opening declaration that Morton “drinks from the vine of syncopation but denies the black soil from which this rhythm was born” to his girlfriend’s last-minute appeal to Jelly, “Admit your pain n’ quit treatin’ people like they was dirt,” Wolfe’s book is programmatic and didactic, an empty vessel waiting for Wolfe the director to breathe life into it.

Like a script, Wolfe’s spoken words can’t be judged by how they read on the page. On March 16th, the day after the board announced his appointment, he made his first address to the Shakespeare Festival staff. (He travelled downtown from the “Millennium” rehearsals and, characteristically, arrived forty-five minutes late.) Since the board had just booted out Akalaitis, some spectators expected to hear a new credo. They were surprised. “He expressed his vision, and the words were the same as JoAnne’s,” someone who was there recalls. Akalaitis, of course, was not there, yet she agrees that on paper she and Wolfe are in accord. “We both believe in new plays,” she says. “We believe in artists. We believe in artists of color. We believe in classics and in visionary productions of classic texts. It’s common sense. No one but an idiot would say, ‘We want to do nothing but oldies and goldies and put stars in them and move them to Broadway.’ ” Yet, except for a few diehard Akalaitis loyalists, the staff members went away excited by their first meeting with producer Wolfe. They were dazzled by his enthusiasm, by his quick wit, by his easy rapport with all sorts of people, by what one calls “his mind-heart connection.” The similarities in text were beside the point. The staff was mesmerized by the production.

“It was very fascinating to me that in all the articles about ‘Angels’ and all the articles about the Public Theatre the fact that I am black was really not discussed,” Wolfe told me. We were sitting in the living room of his apartment, in the West Nineties, surrounded by his collection of black folk art. It was early May, the critics had just seen “Millennium,” and he was about to start work at the Public. His success had dissolved the Homeric epithet: he was no longer the black director or the black writer George Wolfe but simply the director and writer George Wolfe. At thirty-eight, he was wondering what it might mean to leave those racial definitions behind.

He had been concerned when first the Village Voice and then the Times reported that he was gay. His fear, he told me, was that the news of his sexual orientation would obscure his racial identity. “The fact that I was a director of color directing this play was the most important banner I wanted to wave,” he said. “Because I’m breaking a boundary there. Whereas, if the sexuality is stressed, that excuses on a certain level the racial thing. I was concerned that, O.K., I spend the last x number of years of my life being a black director, whatever I do. I go to the street corner and I’m a black director. Now I’m doing ‘Angels in America,’ so I’m a gay director? That bothers me. I think I am the first person of color to direct a major white play on Broadway. In 1993? That’s astounding to me. And horrifying to me. I just didn’t want that to get lost in the mix.”

The previous summer, after the Broadway success of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” he had returned to his home town of Frankfort, Kentucky, for George C. Wolfe Week. He didn’t recall feeling oppressed by segregation while he was growing up, but, as the returning hero, he felt the childhood emotions flooding back. “It was so interesting, walking into these tiny little shops and going, ‘What was so precious here that a little six-year-old boy couldn’t touch, couldn’t walk inside of?’ ” he said. “Or the Capitol Theatre—they wouldn’t let me go in there? Oh, it’s a parking lot now? Good. The first eleven years of my life came rushing back to me with a certain sort of rage. I thought, I’ll show you. And it wasn’t George Wolfe showing you. It was a little black boy showing you.”

His father was a government clerk, his mother a teacher and, later, principal at an all-black private school that George attended. But, as the youngest of three children (a fourth died in infancy), he may have been affected most by his maternal grandmother, Addie President, who was a retired nurse. One winter, just after his mother started teaching, he stayed most nights at Miss Addie’s house, five doors down from his. “I have this vision that she was whispering to me in my sleep,” he said. “She made me feel that no one could think about harming me.” Her vigilant love was a child-size suit of armor, to which he has added bucklers and breastplates over the years.

“He’s not an open book, and he lets you know that,” Kushner, who worked intimately with Wolfe for four months preparing “Millennium” for Broadway, says. “He’s very protected and defended. It’s the thing that Vermeer does in all his pictures, putting a chair or table between you and the woman to let you know that you can look but not touch. Some of it is the culture. What informs George is primarily an African-American thing: ‘I am. I’m not a black empty space in a white world. I have boundaries. You have to let me know you’ll treat me as a person. If you do, I’ll think about letting down the boundaries.’ ”

Wolfe’s exuberant charm is protective, like a high-voltage fence. In any recounting of his family’s history—not just by him, but also by his parents and by his sister, Elayne McNeil—the recurring theme is the demand for respect in a white society. George’s grandmother threatened a white insurance agent with an iron when he failed to remove his hat in her house. George’s mother was less confrontational but equally proud: if a white salesman patronizingly called her “Anna,” she would scheme to find out his wife’s name, so that at their next meeting she could say, “How’s Doris doing?” George says that he grew up as “a Negro—someone who was constructed so as to fit into the structures of white society.” He was taught to hide his feelings beneath “a nice Negro façade,” to “wear a face.” He says, “It’s not pride, it’s not arrogance. It’s being on guard.”

He left Frankfort for good when he transferred from Kentucky State University, then an all-black college that his brother and sister had attended, to Pomona College, in Southern California, to major in theatre. His chief undergraduate accomplishment was a play, “Up for Grabs,” that he wrote and directed. “Up for Grabs” follows a young black man, raised in a soundproofed box, as he passes through doors and metamorphoses into a corporate executive, a “Shaft” superhero, and a revolutionary. A satire about the “journey” of an African-American cut off from his ancestors and his culture, “Up for Grabs” is unmistakably Wolfean. Unlike most other young black playwrights, Wolfe shunned naturalistic family dramas. After graduation, he wrote and staged surreal, highly theatrical fables at the multiracial Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles. In 1979, he moved to New York with letters to the heads of the two major black theatres, the Negro Ensemble Company and the New Federal Theatre, but they had nothing for him. His first professional production in New York, “Paradise,” started as a student project in the New York University musical-theatre program; he wrote the book and lyrics. It was staged in late 1985 at Playwrights Horizons, a great coup—and then it was flattened by the critics. “I was not prepared for the reviews,” Wolfe said. “I can quote them: ‘The best directing the director could have done was put a sign on the door saying “Do not enter.” ’ It was very painful. I had a six-week period of ‘Can’t go on, stormy weather.’ ” Then he was informed that his play “The Colored Museum” had won a national playwriting contest and would be produced the following spring at the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

“The Colored Museum” is a satirical look at the stereotypes of African-American life which pervade American culture. “Paradise,” too, was intended as a satire, about a buffoonish white family that tries to colonize a mythical Caribbean island. But “Paradise” was, with Wolfe’s consent, softened by the director, and Wolfe later felt that he had compromised in the hope of increasing the size of his audience. That fall, “The Colored Museum,” which he had written without commercial design, was brought by Papp to the Public Theatre and had great critical and popular success. Wolfe drew the obvious lesson: he would write what he wanted, and he would fight to direct it himself. Over the next few years, he directed “Spunk,” his own adaptation of three Zora Neale Hurston stories; he drafted—and then, after quarrelling with the producer, abandoned—a libretto for “Queenie Pie,” Duke Ellington’s unfinished opera; he directed, at the Public, a version of Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle” which transposed it to a black island resembling Haiti; also at the Public, he produced the Festival of New Voices, providing a platform for nonwhite solo artists such as Anna Deavere Smith and John Leguizamo; he wrote a screenplay about Josephine Baker; and he worked on “Jelly’s Last Jam,” first as the book writer and then as the director, too. “Jelly” propelled him from the eddies of the downtown art scene into the commercial mainstream, but he was still, despite his captain’s stripes, restricted to African-American ports of call. It was only last December, when he was offered the most touted new play of our day, that Wolfe knocked down the color barrier.

Unhappy with the Los Angeles production of “Angels in America,” Kushner sought a new director. Wolfe was suggested to him by Margo Lion and Jujamcyn Theatres, two of the producers of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” who were now hoping to snare “Angels.” At their initial meeting, Wolfe, who had seen the play only once and with no thought of any professional involvement, won Kushner over with his perceptions. “Angels” opens with the funeral of an old Jewish woman, whose grandson, Louis Ironson, neglected to visit her during the last decade. As the play develops, a lot happens: Louis abandons a lover with AIDS; a repressed homosexual Mormon lawyer named Joe Pitt separates from his wife; and Roy Cohn battles AIDS symptoms and disbarment proceedings. Wolfe said that the entire play was about the woman in the coffin. “You wake up one day and you find yourself disconnected from your source,” he explained. “You wake up one day and you find that you’re Louis and that that woman, Sarah Ironson, is dead. She’s gone and all her secrets are gone. You find yourself in a situation that is much larger than you, which is death, and you don’t know how to survive, because your parents sure as hell didn’t know, because they didn’t listen to her, because she was speaking with a funny accent and they were busy trying to become Americans. They were dropping and changing the ends of their names so they could get invited to that party. So then you come along and your parents have no secrets. They only know how to fit in, and they train you how to do it better. But Sarah’s dead. And you find yourself in a situation where you don’t know what to do next, because you lost touch with some of those ancient truths.”

For Wolfe, the play revealed how links between generations are lost in the assimilation process. (It could sit on the same shelf as “The Colored Museum” and “Jelly’s Last Jam.”) Although Kushner had never seen his play through that filter, he responded fervently. “He was picking up on the things that were really important in the play,” he told me. “It rang true to me.”

Wolfe’s insight into the individual characters also impressed Kushner. For instance, he grasped instinctively how an actor should play the Mormon Joe Pitt, whose bottled-up emotions might suggest a performance of one-note stolidity. “His understanding was that Joe was a shape shifter, transforming himself into something else in each scene,” Kushner said. “That he was not a monolith but, instead, had a constant series of masks that he was putting on. What was inside was chaotic and tortured, but it cracked through very rarely.” Wolfe saw Joe as someone who must don different disguises to satisfy definitions that others impose on him. He saw him as a kind of Negro.

During a break one day in “Millennium” rehearsals, Wolfe said, “You find yourself with the challenge of claiming someone’s rhythms without colonizing them. The production should exist somewhere in the space between Tony’s head and my head.” He meant that he had uncovered in Kushner’s play themes that he identified with intellectually. Intellectually, it’s important to emphasize, because Wolfe’s enthusiasms, while they grow out of his individual background and experiences, are cerebral and astringently unsentimental. Wolfe’s art, like Wolfe himself, enthralls the audience but always maintains a distance. “Jelly” is fascinating and disturbing, but it is not moving. In his production of “Millennium,” too, the emotional aspects of the play are tightly controlled. Jack Viertel, the creative director of Jujamcyn Theatres, said in explaining why he wanted Wolfe as a director for “Angels,” “We knew he would deëmphasize some of the sentimental values of the play and emphasize the hard-edged brilliance of the writing. It would have a very stylish look and clearly articulated text, and it would have its darknesses and its delineated points of light. His inclination is to move away from the naturalistic to a stylized world.”

The tension in any production that Wolfe is developing arises from his obligation to reach out to an audience and his recoil from any hint of pandering to one. During “Jelly” previews, he battled with the star, Gregory Hines, who wanted his character to be more appealing and his numbers to be more rousing. The showdown came at a late-night post-performance meeting that Hines called in his harshly lit dressing room for Wolfe; the lyricist, Susan Birkenhead; and the composer, Henderson. True to form, Wolfe was modifying the show with chesslike deliberation. Hines had a list of changes that he wanted put in now. Wolfe paced in agitation and explained once again why he worked the way he did. It was Henderson who sliced through the dangerously heavy atmosphere. “I take my orders from one person—Mr. Wolfe,” he said. “Me, too,” Birkenhead said. A coup had been suppressed, and Wolfe had reasserted control of the show—but more than that had happened. For one thing, Wolfe gave in to some of Hines’s demands, rewriting several scenes. More important, the dispute wasn’t swept under the rug. It fuelled the anger of Hines’s performance. In the same way, Wolfe’s directive that the chorus members paint white lips on their black faces for a coon dance to end the first act provoked tears, rage, and protest—all of which could be seen in the number. By plotting how to make the audience uncomfortable, Wolfe made his cast uncomfortable and insured that “Jelly” would pack a visceral wallop far from the tap and patter of an all-black Broadway revue.

The conventional way to connect with an audience—by tugging at its heartstrings—he shuns. The major disagreement during “Millennium” previews concerned the music, which Kushner felt was too off-putting. Wolfe compromised, but only so far. For instance, he was willing to use a romantic standard for a lovers’ dance; but instead of “Moon River,” a tune that was in earlier productions, he chose “Skylark,” a song that is vaguely familiar without being instantly recognizable. It may be more elegant, but it’s less effective. “The extent to which George Wolfe is commercial—meaning hundreds of thousands of people coming into a Broadway theatre—is a function of the collaborators he is working with,” the co-producer Margo Lion said. “George needs to work with people who are his intellectual equals but are not afraid to show their emotional side.”

Wolfe’s overriding instinct is for clarity, for making the abstract visible. “The world doesn’t see a lot of gray,” he once told the actor Tommy Hollis. “The world sees black and white, and then it understands.” His mind is so logical and orderly that I was puzzled on learning that he is fascinated by spiritualism, which seemed to be a willful plunge into primitivism by a man who felt too antiseptically intellectual. In New York, Wolfe consults regularly with a Puerto Rican woman called Candy, who lives in the Parkchester housing project in the Bronx and conducts private readings. In Bahia, which has become his favorite holiday destination, he once watched old women possessed by spirits dancing manically, and he visited a woman who, by throwing cowrie shells, told him which African and East Indian gods are his special protectors. All this began to make sense to me after he described a day in Bahia when, sitting in a restaurant and bouncing his head in time to the music, he noticed a throng of little boys pointing at him and laughing. He realized after a few minutes that all the other black people in the room were swaying their whole bodies. The children were mocking the way he was moving only his head. The allure of Bahia is that among the descendants of slaves who were able to keep their African culture more or less intact he can see what has been processed out of black Americans. And the appeal of spiritualists is their apparent power to communicate with his dead ancestors. It’s all in the cause of greater clarity. He wants to make his origins tangible.

In a library alcove off his living room he keeps his collection of family photographs. A framed oval portrait of Miss Addie holds the place of honor. He has an obsessive interest in his ancestors. His knowledge of what they had to surrender and what they retained stiffens his spine. He told me how moved he was by a photograph of his great-great-great-grandmother, who came to this country as a slave. “You have no idea what that did to the way I walk,” he said. “You have no idea what that did. How that said, ‘O.K., I have a right to be.’ ” The family portraits will go with him when he eventually finds time to move to an apartment closer to the Public. The rest of his art collection is under review. “There’s too much junk in here,” he said that afternoon in May. “It’s brilliant, wonderful, stunning junk in here, but I need more space. I need to clean out some of it. I feel that somehow that’s happening in my whole life. In certain respects, I’m getting to know my other selves, other than my racial self. I think I’m having to let go of a lot of stuff that’s no longer essential.”

In mid-August, just before he switched to a part-time schedule at the Public and began rehearsing “Perestroika,” Wolfe fired four staffers who, among them, had almost a century of experience with the Shakespeare Festival. One, Barbara Carroll, was for many years Papp’s personal assistant, and, as much as anyone, embodied continuity with the past. The Shakespeare Festival was often described as a dysfunctional family, with Joe Papp and his wife, Gail Merrifield Papp, who ran the literary department, as father and mother, and with everyone else competing for Joe’s attention. While I was talking to the managing director, Steve Cohen, in his office one afternoon, Wolfe walked in, wanting to show Cohen his revisions of a new organizational chart. (Two days later, on the basis of this analysis, he fired the unlucky four.) Cohen had been surprised when, at their first meeting, in March, which lasted three hours, Wolfe started sketching such a chart. Now he was putting the final touches on a map delineating who did what and who reported to whom. “There never was an organizational chart, in the thirty-eight years of this institution,” Cohen told me. To illustrate what he meant, he suggested that each of us, as an exercise, draw such a plan. As I was doodling a flow chart with boxes and arrows, trying to determine levels of subordination, Cohen showed me his version. It was a circle, with all spokes leading directly to the center. That, I thought, was life under Papp.

Papp, while dying of cancer, devised a dual leadership, in which the artistic director, Akalaitis, and Cohen, who was then called the producing director, shared responsibility. Such an arrangement exists at many nonprofit theatres. It didn’t work at the New York Shakespeare Festival. “I think Joe had created an interim Papp, like an interim Pope,” Robin Wagner, who is a board member, quipped. Part of the problem was that Akalaitis and Cohen viewed each other with contempt. But, beyond that, the Shakespeare Festival had never been a functioning machine; it had been an instrument serving Papp. “People were not encouraged to be inspired or to have ideas,” Akalaitis said. “They were encouraged to be loyal.” Fed by royalties from “A Chorus Line,” the Shakespeare Festival had by the mid-eighties swelled enormously, owning its own production-design shops, employing as many as six hundred people, taking in as much as thirty-five million dollars a year. When the “Chorus Line” revenues dried up, the organization shrank, without anyone rethinking what its role should be.

Once Papp was gone, the board of the Shakespeare Festival began rethinking its own role. “The board was Joe’s creature,” Larry E. Condon, who is the chairman of the executive committee, said. “When you have a strong leader like Joe, he tells the board what to do. It was Joe’s show all the way.” Last September, almost a year after his death, the board held a retreat to figure out where it stood. During the retreat, it asked Akalaitis to draw up a statement of mission. “We asked for a mission statement in September,” Condon said. “We didn’t have one in January. If you’re the artistic director, you have to build support. Your job isn’t just to put on plays.” The news that came to the board last fall was mostly bad: a direct-mail campaign for donations was disappointing; “Angels in America,” which had seemed headed for the Public, went directly to Broadway instead; no Shakespeare production was scheduled for the Public that season; many board members felt that Akalaitis’s program was restricted to her own artsy downtown taste. There was a sense of drift and dissension. Students of modern European history will recognize the signs: the board yearned for a leader.

On December 5th, flying out with Wolfe to Los Angeles to see the last performance of “Angels in America,” Wagner asked the director, “What do you really want to do, ultimately?”

“I want my own theatre,” Wolfe replied.

“How would you feel about running a theatre like the Public?” Wagner went on.

“That would be perfect!” Wolfe said.

Wagner took it upon himself, without his candidate’s knowledge, to let the executive committee of the board know that Wolfe might be available for the job. “Once George indicated that he was interested, we all quickly came to agreement on him,” Condon said. A series of secret meetings, with conversation couched in conditional form (“If the position were to become available . . .”), worked out the details: as producer, Wolfe would have sole control, with powers—including hiring and firing—never granted to Akalaitis. The meetings with Wolfe had to be arranged at late hours, because the director was increasingly enmeshed in rehearsals for “Millennium Approaches.”

That Wolfe had been chosen in late December to direct “Angels,” a politically charged, very high-profile play with prospects of achieving commercial as well as critical success, did not escape the notice of the board. It was precisely the sort of play the board longed for. No one could fairly fault Akalaitis for failing to land it: the decision was Kushner’s, and was based largely on the physical limitations of the Public’s largest stage. And, anyway, the play had been developed at the Mark Taper Forum, in Los Angeles. But the credit only enhanced Wolfe’s reputation as someone who felt as much at home on Broadway as he did on Lafayette Street (a reputation further enhanced when he won a Tony for his direction of “Millennium” in June). “George talks about theatre the way I talk about theatre,” Akalaitis told me. “The difference is he’s the director of ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ and ‘Angels in America,’ and I’m the director of ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ and ‘In the Summer House.’ ”

The circumstances of how Wolfe came to direct “Angels” suggest a larger difference between them. When “Angels” was offered to Wolfe, he had a conflicting commitment to direct Jose Rivera’s play “Marisol” in a Hartford Stage Company production that was bound for the Public. After much tortured debate with his conscience, he wriggled out of it. He said that he couldn’t pass up the artistic challenge and the symbolic racial breakthrough. But some theatre artists, Akalaitis among them, were appalled that he had reneged on a promise to a nonprofit theatre so that he could direct a Broadway show. Akalaitis told me, “I feel that when the nonprofit theatre starts acting like Hollywood, it’s lost. Theatre art is not business as usual.”

Akalaitis and Wolfe had both been artistic associates at the Public under Papp, and they had never hit it off. (Not long before her dismissal, Akalaitis blackballed Wolfe’s nomination to the board.) Personal chemistry aside, however, they have different views of art and of commerce. When I said to Akalaitis that people viewed her administration as rigorously anticommercial, she protested by rattling off her ideas for developing the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park, where the Festival puts on two Shakespeare productions a summer. “I thought the Delacorte should be rented out for weddings and bar mitzvahs,” she said. “I wanted to have a restaurant at the Delacorte.” Her vision extended to Lafayette Street. “I wanted to have a movie house at the Public with a marquee,” she continued. “And I felt that the theatre should be open twenty-four hours a day and be full first of all with plays but also with A.A. meetings and community-board meetings. It’s not that I’m against enterprise. I wanted to take over the neighborhood—turn the parking lot across the street into a sculpture garden with the Whitney, make the neighborhood a cultural area where tourists could come.” Behind all these projects, however, is a philosophy that the theatrical productions themselves are sacrosanct, enclosed as in a reliquary amid all this bustle of Mammon. When you talk to Wolfe, you get a different impression. One of his first personnel decisions was to hire Wiley Hausam, his agent at I.C.M., to work full time at the Public to exploit film, television, recording, and other rights to plays produced there. (Though Wolfe had called for an ethnically diverse staff, three of his first four appointments are white, and the exception is the most junior.) Wolfe has had discussions with pop artists, including Prince and Rickie Lee Jones, about writing musicals. In what is essentially a marketing decision, he concluded that, since the Public’s public was confused by five theatres, each theatre should be given a persona: the Martinson for new American work; the Newman for plays with broader commercial appeal; the Shiva for performance art and solo pieces; the Anspacher for intimate productions that emphasize the text; and the LuEsther for works in development. Whether the general audience will be enlightened remains to be seen, but one special audience—the board—was impressed by this evidence of Wolfe’s “vision.”

To run the Shakespeare Festival successfully, Wolfe has to come up with some creative business ideas, because the baseline financial numbers are so grim. The organization earns less than ten per cent of its $9.4-million budget from ticket sales. Even at the Newman, which is the largest theatre, a huge hit can sell only fifty thousand dollars’ worth of tickets a week. If the production costs forty thousand dollars a week to run, it can continue without further losses but with no hope of recouping an investment that might be six hundred thousand dollars or more. From this economic soil the “hit mentality” flowered. By nurturing productions in-house and then propelling them onto Broadway, Papp found he could make money—lots of money. The royalties thrown off by the Broadway and road-company productions of “A Chorus Line” are still footing the Shakespeare Festival’s deficits. No one expects another “Chorus Line,” and even another “Pirates of Penzance” (which brought in about five million dollars) may be too much to hope for. However, something out of the ordinary is needed. At the Shakespeare Festival, business as usual is a recipe for decline and death. The organization requires an energetic, visionary producer to animate it, someone who can attract foundation and corporate grants, media attention, and exciting new plays. Akalaitis was not such a person. “I know I’m kind of a shy artist,” she told me. “I consider myself hopelessly normal and not exciting. Public language is not something I warm to. I’m kind of a middle-aged downtown woman.”

The notion that in Wolfe the board has found a modern equivalent of Papp was expressed to me most directly by Papp’s widow, who is also a member of the board. Gail Merrifield Papp pointed out that a year or two before his death, when Joe was trying to decentralize the Public Theatre, he offered Wolfe autonomous control of one of the Public’s stages. “Joe had a very strong instinctual feeling that George could head his own theatre with his own vision,” she said. “George was the only person he’d ever had such discussions with.” Wolfe, busy preparing “Jelly” for Broadway, declined. Later, Papp looked elsewhere for an heir. “The problem was that Joe’s illness began to advance very rapidly,” Gail Papp said. “He felt he needed to have someone in place almost immediately. As speculation, I would say that, had he been available, Joe would have picked George to succeed him. I just know that. I know how concerned he was that George have his own theatre as a producer-director. That was unprecedented.”

She went on, “I was talking to somebody yesterday about George and I started saying ‘Joe.’ That never happens to me. In some way, although he’s completely different from Joe, he reminds me of Joe. Joe talked fast, but George talks as fast, or even faster. He skitters over things that may be important, and Joe did that. Joe was it—he came from Brooklyn, he grew up poor in a certain kind of family. He was what he was. If he talked about color-blind casting, this didn’t have to do with his expressing a commitment to something he subscribed to out of liberal ideology. He grew up in a mixed neighborhood. It was something he knew. Not to denigrate people who don’t have that experience, but Joe felt that he was a member of that population, and so does George. You have a constellation of experiences that have a firsthand impact on you. When I tripped over my own tongue, that was what I was thinking. In a different way, George is it.” ♦